


forget me not

by astarisms



Series: natan week [4]
Category: Satan and Me (Webcomic)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Memory Arc, Natan Week, Prompt Fic, recognize/forget
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 15:36:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12535136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astarisms/pseuds/astarisms
Summary: for natan week day 4: she can only remember him when she's dreaming.





	forget me not

Her dreams haunt her when she’s awake. 

She has no memory of the tall demon that settles into her bean bag chair at night, when she curls into a ball on her bed and presses her back against the wall and tries to watch him until exhaustion pulls her under.

Strangely enough, he never touches her at night. At least, not in real life.

Her dreams are another matter.

She doesn’t remember him like he claims she should. She doesn’t entirely believe him either, despite Lola and the doctor — the horsemen, she shudders — seeming to back up his story.

After all, how could she be friends with the Devil? She would like to believe she’s smarter than that, though Lucifer would be quick to reassure her that that wasn’t the case.

He’d take one look at her expression and mumble something resembling an apology under his breath. She didn’t know why his regret made her lungs constrict.

But for all her resistance, every time she goes to sleep, she dreams. Vivid dreams that she has an inkling could be her so-called lost memories, but she’ll never know because when she wakes they slip between her fingers like sand, fuzzy and impermanent.

There are remnants of them, though.

Sometimes when she wakes up she feels warm and light, like a weight has been lifted from her shoulders, and when she first sees him in the morning there’s an overwhelming sense of familiarity.

For a second, his eyes will light up, seeing something in hers that wasn’t there before, and he’ll straighten his back. Immediately, she will look away from him, the warmth oozing out of her. She imagines it resembles what losing a lot of blood at once feels like, though she doesn’t know how she would know that.

She pretends she doesn’t see the hope drain out of him just as quickly and that it doesn’t rattle her.

Sometimes there are nightmares and she’ll jerk awake, sweating and panting and there’s pain, in her head, on her back, on her stomach, on her arm. Sometimes there isn’t any physical indication but it doesn’t matter because even when there is, she can’t  _ remember. _

She can’t remember where the scars on her back come from, or how she got the twin set that indicates something skewered her like a kabob and she tears up in frustration. The memories are  _ there _ but they’re  _ not _ , they’re just out of her reach.

On these nights the mattress will sink with his weight, where he’ll sit on the edge as far from her as possible and offer to tell her a story. She accepts tentatively, if only to distract her from her own inner turmoil.

The stories he tells are not happy ones, they’re dark and end in injury, but they’re captivating nonetheless. When she lays back down she can’t help but get the feeling that they’re more or less the origins of the puckered flesh that litters her body and they give her some distinct form of closure.

It always takes her longer to fall back asleep these nights, and a few times she catches him back on her bean bag chair, hunched over with his head in his heads. His horns are out and they’re bleeding a glowing violet, and her stomach rolls violently, because for all that she doesn’t know about him, she’s learned what those mean.

She turns over then and wills herself to sleep, if only to keep the guilt — for what? she wonders, not for the first time and never for the last — from consuming her.

And sometimes… sometimes when she wakes up it’s with a different kind of warmth. It’s the kind of heat her comforter can’t replicate, and she doesn’t think she would have ever guessed what it was if it wasn’t for the accompanying sensation of hands.

She lays in bed in the morning with the hyperrealistic feeling of fingers threaded through hers. Of hands on her waist, keeping her from falling. Of hands beneath her, pulling her into a hard chest. Of hands on her face, rough and calloused.

She feels whole and full for those brief moments when she wakes up until that, too, fades, leaving her empty and cold and with a man she doesn’t remember but is beginning to think she should.

In quiet moments, her eyes will be drawn to his hands, wondering if they would replicate the phantom touch that lingers long after the dreams themselves disappear. She begins to daydream, wondering if the hands in her dreams were the touch of a friend or the touch of a lover.

Her face goes red and she snaps herself out of her delusions. How could she be fantasizing about the  _ Devil _ in that kind of context? What would Michael, her guardian angel, say to her if he knew?

Shame fills her, heavy and unstill, but it’s not enough to keep her from sensing the eyes on her. It’s not enough to keep her from looking up and meeting eyes that dart away in an instant, but not before she gets a glimpse of some deep-rooted agony.

It knocks the breath out of her every time she sees it. At first, she’d believed his darker emotions were some kind of a show to tug on her heartstrings, to get in her head and bring about her ultimate destruction, but the more time she (unwillingly) spends with him the more she begins to think that’s not the case.

She’d thought him a very good actor, but as it were he was actually a very  _ bad _ one. He couldn’t conceal his despair as well as he might have wanted.

Her heart aches for him but her mind recoils, telling her to stay away, to keep her distance, and for once… she listens.

But at night, when her mind shuts down and it’s all the desires of the heart that come out to play, she dreams. She may not remember them entirely when she wakes, but the remnants are all she needs.

The good and the bad, they’re all about him.

_ Maybe one day… I’ll remember. _

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
